26, June, 2005, This site exposes the
errors and distortions in temperature records used by the IPCC as
evidence of "global warming", scroll down past Australian maps for
those pages. Radical new development as US
Congressional committee demands to see source data behind "Global
Warming" claims.Coolwire 11reviews facts behind the Oxford University based
Climateprediction.net
climate modelling project which uses thousands of PC's around the world
to
run a Hadley Centre (UK Met Office) General Climate Model.
ForBoM
predictive (max & min) temperature "Outlook" maps go to Coolwire 8 For
'02-04
rainfall "Outlooks", which seem just as flawed, go drought pageSee further below for Temperature trends in the
old USSR. Coolwire 10
exposes
urban warming effects in Alaskan temperature data Coolwire index
While here check out my other
science web sites

Page Links For more links scroll down
on left and right Scroll down for "USSR High Magnitude Climate Warming
Anomalies 1901-1996"

Infra-red NASA
satellite image
of Illinois, Indiana & Ohio. City >heat islands are clearly
visible. This heat – from buildings, asphalt, cars etc. – has nothing
to do with the so-called greenhouse effect. Yet the IPCC uses
temperature records from these cities and many others to give a
spurious impression that greenhouse warming is already happening. To
see an example of how the urban heat pictured above feeds into "global
warming", follow the explanation to the right.

NavigationThe left sidebar gives links to all pages
on the site. Pages are designed to be quick loading. Where there
are too many images to load at once, they are accessed by text links direct to pictures.

Growth of the UHIIn Helmut E. Landsberg's book, The Urban
Climate, he gives an example of the new urban area of Columbia,
Maryland, where construction started in 1968. By 1974 when population
had grown to 20,000 the maximum UHI was measured. at 7 degrees Celsius.

GLOBAL WARMINGA fraudulent notion based on corrupted
data *The central
contention of these pages is that for over a decade the IPCC has
published global temperature trends distorted by purely local warmth
from Urban Heat Islands (UHI's). These spurious trends have been
promoted as “smoking
gun” evidence of greenhouse warming. The data were generated by Dr.
P.D. Jones and others (1986, 91 & 94), mainly from the Climatic
Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia at Norwich in
the UK. The CRU and the IPCC claim that our atmosphere has warmed
by ~0.6 to 0.8 degrees Celsius since the late 19th Century,
and ascribe most of this to an enhanced greenhouse effect.

Ever since
the beginning of the greenhouse scare, astute observers have suspected
that urban heat was responsible for a large slice of the purported
warming. The IPCC has stonewalled, telling policymakers that the urban
heat island issue has "...been taken account of." This site proves the
contrary. There is simply no systematic compensation for urban warming
in the Jones dataset. Occasionally there is a slight adjustment in a
record for a site change or other anomaly but the majority of records
are used “raw”. This applies even to large cities with large,
documented heat islands – e.g. Los Angeles, Chicago, Sydney,
Johannesburg etc. etc. In
recent years, two independent remote sensing methods – nightlight
pictures and infrared heat imaging – have clarified the extent of urban
heat islands. Their evidence is incontrovertible. Nightlight images
show that the bulk of CRU’s records come from lit areas of the surface.
Infrared imaging shows that many are from cities with huge heat islands
– enough to raise the annual average temperature by 2-3 degrees Celsius
compared to the surrounding countryside.

The
problem should have been obvious all along.
The UHI was first identified in London 200 years ago, and many
studies have shown that it can raise the temperature even in
small towns. But political correctness, a desire not to "rock
the boat", the corrupting influence of "greenhouse funding"
on the science and sheer wishful thinking have made the urban
heat island a tabu subject in the greenhouse debate. This site
breaks that tabu. It turns the spotlight on individual city
records included in the CRU dataset, and also examines the CRU results
for various "grid cells" across the globe. It leaves no doubt that the
CRU temperature graphs are contaminated with pervasive and substantial
urban heat which has nothing to do with greenhouse gases. Satellite
images of night lights have been published by NASA and give a good
indication of the location
of urban areas over the entire earth. Taking the same midwest
USA area as the Infra Red image above, this is a small preview
of how the Jones / IPCC temperature stations are dominantly
located in urban regions.The IPCC
tell policymakers that the urban heat island issue has "...been taken
account of.." Sure, we can see that, their data is collected mainly
from UHI areas. Follow the Earthlights
link for larger images of the USA with Jones stations
located. See "City reviews" link at left for UHI
contamination in Chicago compared to more rural neighboring
stations. Below is a classic example of century long growth
in small town UHI contamination from the region shown above:

The graphic shows the
Jones 1994 record for Peoria, Illinois, compared with the average
of four nearby rural stations from the US HCN for the 1910-1995 period
for which the most complete data is available. In 1910
Peoria is the cooler, but as its population grows it works its way up
and finishes warmer than the four rurals. The trend lines
generated in MS Excel demonstrate that in this case the inclusion of a
small town, pop. 114,000 inserts ~0.6 degrees Celsius per century
of urban warming into the IPCC / CRU / Jones compilation of
"global warming". This is the "urban contamination" sceptics talk
about. Peoria (Jones 1994)
compared to the average of Minonk, Galva, Rushville, La Harpe.

A few more quick comments on the Peoria
graph and mid west region of USA. [1] Corrected Peoria data from
NCDC and GISS follows closely the rural trend above, so Dr Jones is in
a minority of one by using the UHI affected Peoria. [2] In the 5
degree grid cell containing Chicago, that is between 85 and 90 degrees
west and 40 to 45 degrees north, Jones 94 uses no rural stations. Dr
Jones claims to be measuring regional temperature trends by using data
from Chicago (+6 million), Milwaukee (1.4 million), Grand Rapids
(600,000), Madison (324,000), Fort Wayne, Green Bay, Peoria, Rockford,
South Bend, and Urbana all between 100,000 and 200,000 population. The
list of twelve stations is rounded off by Muskegon Air Port (listed as
40,000 population by the GHCN and nearby Grand Haven at 12,000.

* Refers to
thermometer based measures of global temperature changes over the last
150 or so years as promoted by the IPCC.

Over the next few months the Russian
government is debating whether or not to ratify Kyoto. A situation rife
with many ironies. How will the Moscow mandarins sell Kyoto to
its far flung people who every year of their lives battle winter
hardships that few of us have any experience of. How will
the "sell" go. Could this line work, "Comrades, the
Europeans are taxing ther people in order to save you from warmer
winters. They want us to join them in the Kyoto treaty."
Can you hear the silence echoing from the icicles
around a hall in Siberia. But we know the issue will
not be decided on the common sense of the Russian people and their
scientists but on what the Europe politicians can deliver in booty to
the Kremlin bosses.

As if there is not enough irony in the above
for one story. We have the situation that looking at the global
distribution of "warming anomalies" going to make up IPCC "Global
Warming", it
is clear the the "noisy" temperature data in the old USSR gave Dr
Jones and his Norwich Climate Research Unit their best hunting
grounds to generate high magnitude warming anomalies.
Unfortunately
for the citizens of those far flung regions the only way to
enjoy warmer
winters is to live in an urban heat island (UHI) and/or have
access to the fuel you need at a price you can afford. Kyoto
will not affect UHI's but will make your life harder with
higher energy
prices more likely. The article below sets out chapter and verse
how the Jones / IPCC high magnitude warming anomalies have been
generated and how a more realistic survey of those data would see much
less warming hence much less global warming.
You read it first here.

USSR High Magnitude Climate
Warming Anomalies
1901-1996

Abstract

Station temperature records are examined in nine five-by-five degree
grid cells in the former USSR claimed by Karl 1998 to have warmed by
circa 2 degrees over the period 1901-1996. Karl’s results,
derived from updated Jones 1994 grid point data, are compared with
temperature records from the Jones 1994 global update, the V2 GHCN and
the NASA GISS website. In no grid cells are rural station records
found to justify the warming claimed in Karl 1998. In three grid
cells, stations with warming trends close to the Karl 1998 anomaly
magnitudes are found, but in all three cases cities are the source of
the apparent warming, which is not apparent at nearby small town or
rural stations. The other six grid boxes contain either stations
not warming at the rate suggested in Karl 1998, or very incomplete data
for the 1901-1996 period. Station-by-station comparisons in all
grid boxes show significant trend differences between Jones 1994 and
GHCN/GISS data.

Introduction

The veracity of the surface temperature record will continue to be
questioned as long as the aggregates used include urban sites, and as
long as there is significant departure from lower troposphere
temperature trends measured by radiosondes and satellites.

In recent years it has become apparent that a sizeable share of
century-long "global warming" was in the region of the former
USSR. This paper examines at the level of individual weather
station records the evidence for the claim in Karl 1998 of circa 2
degrees warming during 1901-1996 in nine grid boxes in Siberia and
eastern Kazahkstan. Figure 1 shows
the warming over this period from the updated Jones 1994 global dataset
as
used by Karl 1998 in his contribution to the IPCC publication "The
Regional Impacts of Climate Change".

Figure 1

The boxes shaded grey in Figure 2 were shown in Karl 1998 as warming
by 2 degrees over the indicated period. In this and subsequent
figures, crosses indicate Jones 1994 stations, while square
diamonds show the Version 2 GHCN stations of Peterson and Vose
1997. The boxes form
four zones, reviews of which can be accessed through the following
links:

The Version 2 Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) station data
(Peterson and Vose 1997) provide the mainstay for this
study. These data come from ~7000 stations worldwide, but GHCN
mean adjusted data are based on a smaller sample which excludes poorer
quality data.

There are 312 stations from the old USSR in the GHCN. It
should be noted that the GHCN contains duplicate data for many station
names. This is often because separate nearby localities in cities
have been archived together. The duplicates are numbered in the
GHCN data files starting from 0 (the GHCN preferred version).
Version 0 has always been used here. This detail is mentioned
because as will be seen in this review, other surveys have
accessed different data sources resulting in disparate data choices for
the same station. As an example of this, Figure 3,
downloaded from the GISS website, shows that 7 sets of widely
divergent data are available for Irkutsk.

Figure 3

The Jones 1994 updated data contains just over 3500 stations, more
than twice the Jones et al 1991 compilation. In the area of the
old USSR, 298 stations are shown, almost as many as in the GHCN.

The NASA GISS website provides a third source of global
temperature records. By selecting points on a global map it is
possible to view graphs (see Fig. 3) from a range of data types and
also to download a table of the station data. GISS data is more
processed than the GHCN and has fewer gaps, but the trends are usually
similar to the GHCN. The term “gissGHCN” used on chart legends
refers to GISS data termed “GHCN Adjusted”. This is the only GISS
data used in this study.

Discussion

This study focuses on whether there is any evidence for the claimed
warming from rural stations where data can be demonstrated to be
substantially homogenous with neighbouring stations. It is
interesting that two recent papers by compilers of global temperature
databases, Peterson et al 1999
and Hansen et al 1999, which discuss the V2 GHCN and GISS data
respectively, insist that global trends are little affected whether one
uses rural station data only or mixed city/rural data. This is
not so in these USSR
high warming grid boxes, where cities clearly warm more than rural
stations.

The present study also shows that, to a surprisingly large extent,
the issue of whether or not the claimed warming is present in these
grid boxes depends on which set of station data the reader chooses to
rely on. The Jones 1994 data, which also forms the basis for many
IPCC presentations, generally warms more than GHCN/GISS data for
equivalent stations. The differences between the two sets of data
are significant and suggest that at least one is seriously flawed.

Many USSR stations have significant missing data which reduces the
confidence that can be placed in trends.

Summary of Findings

In not one grid box, in any of the
datasets, could this survey find in homogenous rural records the
1901-1996 warming magnitudes featured in Karl 1998.

In 80% of comparisons the Jones 1994 trends were warmer than GHCN or
GISS. The GHCN and GISS trends are generally in fair agreement
considering the sparse station density and frequent gaps in data.

In some cases, strong warming trends
were based on data from fast-growing cities such as Irkutsk.
In view of the well-documented urban heat island effect in such
localities and the easily demonstrable warming compared to nearby rural
sites, the use of such data to contribute to global climatic
trends lacks credibility.

Data gaps early in the 1901-1996
period, and the increased likelihood of outlier data in pre-1935 records
which are hard to check, may have imparted other non-climatic effects
on trends. In particular, Jones habit of often shortening data
has inserted warming into a trend.

Despite the central control of the soviet system, the continuity of
meteorological recordings over the period is far from impressive.
It also appears that economic and social re-adjustments during the
1990's have precluded significant improvement in record-keeping over
this huge land-mass, despite the sharper focus on climate issues since
1988. Given the substantial contribution of “Soviet
warming” to “global warming” shown in Fig 1, it is
vital to reassess all of the Soviet station-by-station records.